Rosemary Kennedy

• 1. Introduction

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  Rosemary Kennedy once sat down and copied out, slowly and laboriously, a reply that someone else had written in her name. The Boston Globe had asked to interview her. Her father's assistant composed the answer instead. In it, she was made to say that she had studied the method of Dr. Maria Montessori and had earned a degree in teaching the year before. Rosemary was the eldest daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Her brothers included a future president and two future senators. Yet the polished words she copied out were far from the truth of her life. In the decades that followed, her family kept her whereabouts hidden. Why did her father choose surgery for her in 1941? What did that decision do to her? And how long did the world, and even her own brothers and sisters, go without knowing where she was?

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• 2. A Difficult Birth

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  Rose Marie Kennedy was born at her parents' home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on the 13th of September 1918. She was the third child and the first daughter. She was named for her mother and was usually called Rosemary or Rosie. An outbreak of Spanish influenza meant that the doctor could not be found right away. According to the account, a nurse told Rose Kennedy to keep her legs closed. That held the baby's head in the birth canal for two hours and cut off her oxygen, causing harm. As Rosemary grew, her parents saw that she was missing the usual milestones. At two years old, she struggled to sit up, to crawl and to learn to walk. Later accounts describe an intellectual disability, though some people have questioned how the Kennedys described its nature and extent. One biographer wrote that Rose Kennedy confided in no friends and acted as if her daughter were developing typically. Relatives outside the immediate family knew nothing. Tutors were hired, but learning to read and write would remain hard for Rosemary.

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• 3. Schooling Apart

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  At age 11, Rosemary was sent to a boarding school in Pennsylvania for people with intellectual disabilities. Five years later, she moved to the Sacred Heart Convent in Elmhurst, Providence, Rhode Island. There she was taught apart from the other students. Two nuns and a special teacher named Miss Newton spent the whole day with her in a separate classroom. The Kennedys thanked the school with the gift of a new tennis court. Her reading, writing, spelling and counting were reported to be at a fourth-grade level, the level of children aged 9 to 10. Her mother also found a way to ease her into social life. She arranged for Rosemary's older brother John to take her to a tea dance. With him beside her, Rosemary seemed "not different at all." Tea dances like that one would fill many pages of the diaries she kept as a young woman.

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• 4. Diaries and Debut

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  Winnie-the-Pooh was among the few books Rosemary read. The diaries she wrote in the late 1930s were published in the 1980s. They show a young woman whose days were full of opera outings, tea dances and dress fittings. In 1939, she went with her family to Rome for the coronation of Pope Pius XII. She also visited the White House. Her parents described her to the press in rosy terms. Woman's Day was told that she was studying to be a kindergarten teacher. Parents magazine heard that she cared about social welfare work but secretly longed for the stage. Her biggest public moment came in 1938, during her father's time as United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. She was presented as a debutante to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. Rosemary had practiced the elaborate royal curtsy for hours. At the event itself, she tripped and nearly fell. The crowd said nothing, and the King and Queen smiled as though nothing had happened. Rose Kennedy never spoke of the stumble and treated the evening as a triumph. Within two years, Rosemary would be back in America, and the picture would change sharply.

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• 5. Mounting Troubles

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  Rosemary's sister Eunice later said that on her return from the United Kingdom in 1940, Rosemary became "increasingly irritable and difficult." She was 22. She often had convulsions. She also flew into violent rages and hit and injured other people. A summer camp in western Massachusetts expelled her. She lasted only a few months at a boarding school in Philadelphia. Next she was placed at a convent school in Washington, D.C. There she began slipping out at night. The nuns feared that she might be seeing sexual partners, catch a sexually transmitted disease or become pregnant. Her erratic behavior frustrated her parents. Her father worried most about the shame it could bring on the family, and about the damage to his own political career and to those of his children. Soon, doctors offered him what they described as a remedy.

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• 6. The Operation

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  Doctors told Joe Kennedy Sr. that a lobotomy would calm his daughter's mood swings and end her violent outbursts. Rosemary was 23. He decided she should have the operation, and he did not tell his wife until it was over. It took place in November 1941. James W. Watts performed it with Walter Freeman, both of the George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences. Decades later, Watts described it to Ronald Kessler, who included the account in his 1996 biography of Joe Sr., Sins of the Father. Rosemary was lightly sedated and, Watts thought, awake. He made a cut of no more than an inch on each side near the front of her head. His instrument, he said, looked like a butter knife. As he swung it, Freeman asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer, sing "God Bless America" or count backward. Her answers guided how far they cut. They stopped when she began to speak incoherently. Watts told Kessler that he did not think Rosemary had "mental retardation." He believed she had a form of depression. A review of the two doctors' papers supported him, since every patient they lobotomized had been diagnosed with a mental disorder. Bertram S. Brown, who directed the National Institute of Mental Health and had once been an aide to President Kennedy, offered Kessler another view. He said Joe described his daughter as intellectually disabled rather than mentally ill, to protect John's reputation for a presidential run. The damage was soon clear. Rosemary's mental capacity fell to that of a two-year-old. She could not walk, could not speak intelligibly and was incontinent. Almost at once, she was sent away.

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• 7. The Kennedy Cottage

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  For several years, Rosemary lived at Craig House, a private psychiatric hospital about 90 minutes north of New York City. In 1949 she was moved to Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she stayed for the rest of her life. Her new home was on the grounds of the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children, which was once called the St. Coletta Institute for Backward Youth. Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston had told her father about the place, which served more than 300 people with disabilities. Joe Sr. traveled there and had a private house built for her. It stood about a mile from the main campus, near Alverno House, a residence for adults who needed lifelong care. The nuns called it the Kennedy cottage. Two Catholic nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, looked after her. A student helped, and a woman came three nights a week to make ceramics with her. Rosemary had a car for rides and a dog to walk. Her family, meanwhile, stayed far away.

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• 8. A Secret Kept

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  Rose Kennedy did not visit her daughter for 20 years. Joe Sr. never visited the institution at all. Kate Clifford Larson, author of Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, wrote that the lobotomy was hidden from the family for 20 years. None of Rosemary's siblings knew where she was. In 1958, John was campaigning to keep his seat in the U.S. Senate. The family explained her absence by saying she was reclusive. In 1961, after John won the presidency, they finally gave a public explanation. They did not mention a failed lobotomy. They said instead that she had been judged intellectually disabled. That same year, a stroke left Joe Sr. unable to speak or walk, and Rosemary's siblings were told where she was. Her sister Eunice spoke publicly about Rosemary's condition in a 1962 interview with The Saturday Evening Post. The lobotomy itself stayed secret until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin revealed it in her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. One more shift in the family's treatment of Rosemary still lay ahead, after her father's death.

  Joe Sr. died in 1969, and the Kennedys slowly began to bring Rosemary back into family life. She was sometimes taken to visit relatives in Florida and Washington, D.C. She also went back to her childhood home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. By then she had learned to walk again, though with a limp. Her arm was palsied, and she never regained clear speech. People sometimes credit her condition as the inspiration for Eunice's founding of the Special Olympics in 1968. Eunice rejected that framing. She told The New York Times in 1995 that Rosemary was only one of several disabled people she invited to her house to swim, and that the games should not center on any one person. Rosemary died of natural causes on the 7th of January 2005, at the age of 86. She was at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Her sisters Jean, Eunice and Patricia, and her brother Ted, were with her. She was buried beside her parents at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.

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